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The advance of technology

I’m sure many of you will remember the tech of yesteryear. Yep, I mean the VCRs and tape recorders and record players that were around only a few decades ago. Such stuff as 8-track audio cassettes are now antiques in the modern world when normally “antique” means something over 100 years old.

The picture shows just one tiny aspect of technology. Only 30 years ago floppy disks held only a few hundred thousand characters and they were 8″ in diameter. Storage technology has advanced so much that little black sqaures of plastic only 15mm sqare now hold a tens of billions of characters.

This shows has fast the progress of technology has become.

Is it too fast? It might be for grandma and grandpa but for kids who are growing up now using the tech is just part of their environment.

Where will it take us in the next 50 years? Will we have anti-gravity hover boards or will it all be just the same as now but different. In other words will the telly morph from the current 2D into 3D extremely high resultion with interactive feedback all using the internet.

There are many technological advances that bring great benefits, of course. Some, maybe less so. Much of the mass consumer stuff may even have negative consequences. A reliance on things like sat nav, addiction to i-pods (or i-anything else) and electronic communication might retard the development of simpler, but more reliable, ways of doing things – map reading, talking. My mother (81) does not own, or wish to own, a computer – “I’ve had 81 happy years without one, and who is this young whippersnapper Martha Lane Fox to tell me how to live my life?”

You can see this a bit with food. Not many people grow their own vegetables and rear their own pig. Too many people think food originates in supermarkets (or MacDonalds).

Sometimes, simpler is better, and longer lasting. One of my hobbies is cabinetmaking. I prefer to work with hand tools (it’s quieter, and the batteries don’t go flat). I have (among quite a few older tools) a patternmaker’s paring chisel that I inherited from my grandfather. By tracing the maker’s mark, I know that this chisel is at least 130 years old, and possibly more like 150. It still works beautifully, as it did for my grandfather, and still will when I’m six feet under. You won’t get that with an electric anything.

I would disagree with you slightly. I’m all for technology and progress, but not to solve problems that don’t exist. Sat-nav and iPods problems are only misuse. Sat-navs still require understanding of maps. Mobile phones have enabled more talking and communication and I would include text as communication, just in a different language.

I would agree with your grandmother though. If you are happy with what you’ve got you don’t necessarily need better tech. We’ve got a 15yr old TV for instance, no fancy LCD for us until the current one breaks. My mobile phone is a brick – SMS and calls only, bought for £9 brand new. That’s what the advance in tech has done for phones – from luggable phones with 1hr battery life costing a grand to tiny fraction of a Kg with a week’s battery life costing a tenner.

Food. The bigger the farm the better in my view. You can grow your own, but what happens when there is some local problem or disease. That’s the problem with Africa – being forced to stay as subsistence farmers by charities. It’s because we moved from agriculture to the factory that the UK is one of the leading western nations. Instead of 70% of the population creating food for the everyone we now have 10% (the numbers aren’t accurate just a guide) producing food. The 60% now released from the field can go on to do more productive things that have moved our society onwards and upwards.

By the way, I like my woodwork (C&G level 2). But I use my tools appropriately for the situation that requires it because it means that it is easier and quicker to do the same job that it would take hours to do by hand. To do something by hand when tools exist is to be a true craftsman though. You do need to be very very good. But if you had to live off your work you would be starving within the week unless you charged large amounts for your product. Which is why many craftspeople do it as a hobby.

Remember when an operating system fitted on a floppy? When a ‘patch’ was just that and not the whole program? When a 10Mbyte hard drive provided enough e-mail storage for a whole company? When computing would ‘take off’ when ‘core store’ cost a cent per bit?

Now data storage is so cheap we are buried in dross, billions of out of focus pictures of drunken students. Such is ‘progress’. Pity any historian who tries to trawl through this junk in future!

Wherever it takes us will be a surprise. One only needs to watch episodes of “Tomorrow’s World” to see that. As a technophile I have to believe that much of the progress will be of benifit to mankind. I seem to recall a suggestion from the 60′s which said that if the population growth from the 1800s had been the same without the discovery of internal combustion engines, we would all have been up to our necks in horse manure.

Don’t pooh-pooh the idea of being up to one’s neck in horse manure! I’ve been steeping myself neck-high in nag plop at least once a month for the last 15 years and I think the results speak for themselves.

So far no-one has commented on the one glaring problem with all these advances in technology- the means to retrieve the data. Who has a 5 3/4 floppy drive, zip drive, laserdisc player, DAT player, minidisc player etc, etc? Without the means to retrieve the data we have an information black hole. Archivists have been commenting on this for years.

I seem to remember that Microsoft told the British Museum that the answer was the Virtual PC.

Now there is at least one problem to that, the original software and operating system has to be loaded onto that virtual machine. Now that is all very well for say MS-DOS 6 but how about XP which needs activation?

Then there is the hardware needed to support the old media formats, does it exist and can it be fitted to the ‘real’ PC that runs the virtual PC.

I did work on a documentation project once that had source material on some weird floppies larger than 8″. The simplest approach was just to re-type everything from paper masters!

@Dave – Retrieval? At least, with most ‘earlier’ (pre-y2k?) devices, it should be possible to examine the ‘storage areas’ (Microscope and/or electrical probes?) & reverse-engineer circuitry. BUT don’t hold too much hope of doing this when there are Gb of encrypted binary code per mm^2 of the ‘chip’?

(I have an apparently functional Sinclair ZX81 – that used ordinary Audio-tape Cassettes for mass storage)

Technology delivers amazing benefits, but it also carries a cost. The only reason most ‘technology’, be that TV, e-mail, text, twitter, mobile phones etc. are affordable is because a mass-market was created. It is that mass which enables them to be produced and operated at levels which we can all afford, thus gaining access to our own personal benefits.

Downside is that, in creating that mass-market, the channel is then opened up to the mass diet of trivia or filth which probably represents 90% of the content. But the same was true of printing, then home-movies, then VHS – all were actually built on the silent background trade of pornography, which generated the seed-cash to get them established and popularised – once popular and available, they allowed more ‘respectable’ uses to be developed, from which the rest of the people then benefitted.

And we shouldn’t forget the side benefits – Wigner’s Friend (above) alludes to the horse manure problem being alleviated by the internal combustion engine, but there is another startling fact. In around 1900, almost 30% of British agricultural land was being used solely to grow ‘fuel’ for horses. The progressive demise of Dobbin has enabled that land to be reallocated to human food-crops, thus sustaining the burgeoning population and reducing imports.

Swings and roundabouts sums it up, but technology will continue to develop and our lives will continue to be changed by it – for better or for worse may be a matter of personal opinion.

@Mud – “around 1900, almost 30% of British agricultural land was being used solely to grow ‘fuel’ for horses.”

A lot of that ‘fuel’ was used transporting food (& bedding) to the horses permanently living in urban areas beyond a single day’s journey – (and to their drivers, grooms, farriers &c) – so THEY could deliver the human needs. Carting the dung back to the ‘countryside’ for use as fertiliser (aka ‘recycling’) was in itself a major industry with specialised vehicles .

The logistics were largely worked out in 17-18c for provisioning armies on Campaign – and have much in common with the principles of the multi-stage rocket!

At this point, local storage is heading towards being a cache for what’s in the cloud; it’s cheaper for Google, Microsoft, DropBox et al to provide redundant storage than for J.Random user to back up the data he really cares about. So expect the cost of 1Tb network storage to converge towards the cost of 2.5 x 1Tb drives at wholesale rates.

The only thing that hits me about your example (and I remember 8in floppy disks BTW) is that the big advance shown is one of minaturisation and capacity rather than function. They all store essentially the same type of digital data. So it’s more like having a 50 year old car engine and now having one that fits in a fag packet and drives the car at 1000 mph – but is still a petrol 4 stroke. It’s seriously impressive progress, but that type of improvement won’t make a breakthrough into anti-gravity or teleportation – both of which are desperately needed! – because they require a new strand of technology.